A first class of portable devices that include a software-maintained calendar and a software-accessible clock that allow a user to keep track of a schedule of meetings, appointments, and other types of events, has become generally available and such the use of such devices is widespread. Such devices include notebook and sub-notebook computers, personal digital assistants, and pocket PCs among others. Some of these devices use volatile storage such as memory storage and some permanent storage such as hard disk drive or non-volatile memory storage to store such events. Each event such as a meeting or an appointment may have associated with it multiple attributes such as a name, textual information, image and sound files, priority levels, status of acceptance by attendees, among many others. Meetings and appointments may, for example, be characterized as face-to-face, web-based, or telephone meetings.
A second class of devices with alert mechanisms that may be audible, illuminating, or vibrating tactile alerts, among others, are now ubiquitous in both business environments as well as in the general public arena. Examples of such devices include cellular phones and portable paging devices, among many others.
These alert mechanisms serve a variety of purposes. In the case of cellular telephones, alert mechanisms such as a circuit to produce an audible alert, where such an alert is a ringing tone, a beep sequence or a musical tone sequence, may indicate the arrival of an incoming call. In other cases a similar alert may indicate the arrival of a text message at the cellular telephone. In other cases, the alert may indicate the meeting of a threshold condition, such as when a stock price of an equity traded at a stock exchange reaches a specific value. In the case of a portable pager, an alert mechanism being activated may cause a beeping tone to sound, a musical chime to be played, a light-emitting component to be switched on, or a tactile vibrating alert to be activated, when an incoming page is received, or in some cases when a clock internal to the pager reaches a predetermined time, in which case the device serves as an alarm clock.
A problem in the use of this second type of device, exemplified by a cellular telephone, is that users may not wish to have alerts enabled or perceptible at all times. For example, a person in a meeting may wish to not have a cellular telephone ring even if an incoming call is detected. Similarly, a person may wish to have his or her pager silenced for the duration of a theater performance or alternatively wish to have it set to alert that person in a tactile vibrating mode only. While devices with alert mechanisms such as the ones discussed do often have means allowing a user to manually disable the alert mechanism, doing so consistently in order to avoid disturbance at events sensitive to noise or other intrusive occurrences is error prone because of its manual nature. Similarly, a person who has disabled an alert mechanism for a sensitive event may omit, through human error, to re-enable it after the event has ended, resulting in a possible failure to receive an important alert.
The information about the times and durations of meetings and appointments that would be useful in providing an automated system of disabling or altering alert mechanisms in the second class of device, such as a cellular telephone, is often available to a user in the form of a stored schedule in the first class of device, such as a Pocket PC. Hitherto, however, no method known exists to automatically use such stored event information in one of the first class of devices in order to disable or alter an alert mechanism in one of the second class of devices in order to solve the problem of unwanted intrusion during sensitive events due to an alert.